


Heterodynes 101: Adaptive Communication with Minions, Associates, and Allies

by NevillesGran



Series: Heterodynes 101 [1]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: (Belated), Gen, Girl Genius Event Week 2018, Heterodyne Boys Generation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-10 00:11:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16459733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: Befriending Heterodynes, particularly teenage Heterodynes who have barely left their city before and are determined to be heroes, or at least decent human beings, nevertheless, is...an ongoing learning experience for everyone.





	Heterodynes 101: Adaptive Communication with Minions, Associates, and Allies

**Author's Note:**

> For Day...4? Generation Euphrosynia/ **Generation Bill** /Generation Agatha. Please consider this a follow-up to https://tanoraqui.tumblr.com/post/130254087562/heterodynes-101, which I could have sworn I'd already posted here but apparently not. To be rectified!

**Can we get more Klaus, Bill, and Barry interaction? Canon or au, I just really like the way you write their friendship.**

 

Picture the scene: the main road to Beetlesburg, winding, wide and would-be white—if it were better maintained, this far from the city itself, and dirt hadn’t long-since slipped between the once-shining stones. Now, said dirt is turning muddy under a grey and drizzling sky.

Three young men trudge along the side of the road, their charred clothes in curious contrast to the ambient damp. One is even shirtless, despite the chill. He is, at least, wearing a coat—presumably that of his taller friend, as it drags slightly at his boots, accumulating yet more mud. He carries a device of wooden struts and winding brass wires, and is debating something with the shortest of the three, a young man just into his teens with his hair pushed back behind oversized bronze goggles. An assortment of odd tools covers his vest. Between them, the coatless fellow with the shock of white hair uses one muscular arm to hold what appears to be an engine on his shoulder, and keeps a watch on the surrounding countryside rather than joining in his fellows’ energetic discussion. The way he twitches to watch the ideas tossed back and forth, it is clear he is only just barely restraining himself. With all the clues together—the tools, the mysterious mechanisms, the fervor of speech—it is, in fact, quite simple to account for these young men’s curious state: they are sparks! And students, no doubt. The charring—and shirtlessness of the dark-haired one—is not precisely explained, but it is made explicable.

Move closer, and listen:

“If we extended the break lever—”

“It would just _get in the way_ of the other controls,” argued Bill. “What we need to do is re-hook the tenement pins in the _third engine wheel_ —”

“No, I mean the lever _in_ the brake mechanism,” said Barry. “The one that _keeps freezing up_. If it was longer, it wouldn’t take as much pressure to _push_ —”

Klaus was trying to keep an eye out for danger rather than get involved in the debate. They had landed distinctly out of Beetlesburg’s radius of patrolled safety. But….

“That would get in the way of the main gas line,” he pointed out. “Unless you’re suggesting we reroute it _around_ the steering mechanisms?”

Bill rubbed his chin, Klaus’s overly large sleeves flapping around his wrists. “We _do_ need to reinforce the tiller base somehow, so it doesn’t come loose again.” He cast a glance to where the frayed remains of his shirt were wrapped over a large, still somewhat bloody slice in Klaus’s forehead.

Klaus reached up the touch the makeshift bandage, adjusting his grip on the engine on his opposite shoulder as well. “I told you, it only looks bad.”

“You might have a concussion,” said Barry, who was himself favoring a sprained knee. It hadn’t been a truly spectacular crash to their latest zeppelin design, but it had been reasonably impressive. Barry snickered, and added, “And Bill’s hoping Lucrezia Mongfish will see him without his shirt on.”

“I am not!”

“My mistake.” Barry adopted a sing-song voice. “You want _any_ of the girls to see you without your shirt. So long as Judy doesn’t catch you first.”

“I’ll catch _you_ ,” Bill threatened, in the manner of older brothers everywhere. He held back a step to reach behind Klaus’s back to smack Barry other with the tiller he was carrying—the same one that had left a gash in Klaus’s head. (There were many scavengers this far out of the city; any piece of their craft they’d left behind was as good as gone. So they’d taken the most cleverly invented parts to carry home and given up on ever retrieving the rest.)

Klaus twisted to better see and dodge any altercation, and his eyes caught on a large wagon cresting the hill behind them. It was big, big enough to hold well over a dozen people, with a propulsion machine near the back that sent steam hissing into the sprinkling sky. It was painted dark reddish-brown, save for the picture of the grotesquely grinning skinless head above the drivers at the front.

Klaus dropped his engine, kicked it off the side of the road—his foot would send the complaint for that later—and dragged both Heterodynes after it into the ditch beside the old, stained stones.

“What—” “Klaus—”

“Shh,” he hissed, pushing their heads down. “Bad company.”

He should have known that was the wrong thing to say.

“What sort?” asked Bill, weaseling out of the hold to poke his head over the edge of the ditch.

Barry didn’t even bother asking, just ducked away from Klaus and peered up the road. His nose wrinkled in disgust. “Hevvling and Sons.”

“Exactly,” said Klaus, and pulled them both back again. This was not, he knew, the _exact_ reason why most TAs didn’t voluntarily spend time with the undergrads, but it was representative. “Rare body parts traders, worst in Romania. We _don’t_ want to be caught in the open by these people.” It might be too late. He could only hope they’d gotten down quickly enough.

“They haven’t been around in a while,” said Barry, far too nonchalantly for Klaus’s taste. “I thought maybe they’d finally been busted by some hero.”

Klaus snorted at the idea of anything ending so happily. “Who would dare? Everyone knows they’re favored by the–”

Bill jumped back onto the road and stood, waving the broken tiller over his head. “Hoy, Hevvling! Hold up! Hyu got room for a few passengers?”

“… _Heterodynes_ ,” Klaus finished in abject horror.

“Play along,” Barry hissed, and scrambled up beside Bill.

Klaus, for lack of any better idea, followed.

The wagon slowed as it neared them, Up close, it was very clearly painted with dried blood, and smelled of sweat and drying blood.

It rolled to a stop. A heavyset man with a wide brow and oversized grey moustache leaned toward them with a friendly leer. Beside him, a slightly thinner, less greyed version—one of the eponymous Sons—held a steering wheel.

“Why, young Master William!” said Hevvling the elder. “And younger Master Barry!”

He chuckled at his own joke. By Barry’s flicker of a scowl, it was a reused one.

“Last I saw, you were half a meter shorter each—and your father was puttin’ the kibosh on your hankerin’s of going out of town. Finally changed his mind, did he?”

“Yez, finally.” Bill rolled his eyes. He wasn’t standing straighter per se, but slouching forward in a way that seemed to fill more space than he had been before. His Mechanicsburg accent had thickened like setting concrete.

He waved his hand in the general direction of back down the road, and off to the east. “We crashed our airship in a field a couple miles back. Ken hyu give uz a ride back to Beetlesburg?”

Hevvling scratched his moustache. “Beetlesburg? Not Mechanicsburg? What business are you havin’ there?”

“None of hyours,” retorted Bill, Lord Heterodyne.

“We’re attending the university,” Barry said at the same time, sounding abruptly on the edge of an intense fugue. His accent had slipped sharply towards Old Mech as well. Klaus did his best not to stare openly at the two of them.

“The university!” Hevvling raised a bushy eyebrow. “How’d you manage that?”

“Mother talked Father around,” Barry said. “And old Beetle, well…”

Bill’s smile was too thin to have that many teeth. “We negotiated.”

Hevvling chortled. “I bet you did! I always knew you’d go far, Master William, always say it to the Lord your father. And here you are, already kilometers out!” He chuckled again at his own wit.

Bill did a masterful job hitting the pitch of a man who did _have_ patience, but did not feel like extending it much longer. “Kind of hyu. But at the moment, we’d really like to be gettink out of the rain…?”

“Of course, of course.” He turned to his son, voice sharpening from grandfatherly to something more like a bark. “Hans! Join Evon inside. The young masters will take your seat.”

Hans stood with the faint sigh of a man idly considering patricide. Unfortunately, Hevvling and Sons being taken over by the Sons would improve neither their reputation nor their business model. He gave the Heterodyne boys a jerky bow. “Happy t’ help a good customer.”

Hevvling Sr. eyed Klaus like he saw the scars under his shirt and could calculate just by looking which internal organs might be atypical enough to be interesting on the market. Klaus considered trying to appear meek, but found he was already returning the stare with roughly equivalent consideration of how best to tear the man limb from limb.

The trader didn’t bat an eye. He turned back to Bill and Barry to ask, “And who’s this?”

“A new minion from school,” said Barry, while behind their backs (out of Hevvling’s sight), Bill made a hand gesture that Klaus thought might mean _don’t panic_. “Hiz name iz Klaus.”

“Hello,” Klaus said shortly, because the situation seemed to require it.

“Klaus, get the equipment, would hyu?” Bill didn’t look back as he stepped onto the cart, just tossed the request over his shoulder like the order it clearly was.

“The tiller iz delicate,” Barry snapped. “Hy’ll get it myself.” And he slid back down the embankment.

Again, for lack of anything better, Klaus followed.

But they didn’t have time to talk. They barely had time for Barry to mouth, _I’m sorry_ , as he grabbed the (breaking, but not particularly delicate) tiller and Klaus hoisted the engine back onto his shoulder. The half an encouraging smile that followed seemed to say _apology for temporary inconvenience_ rather than _I like you, so I actually regret that we’re going to kill you and take you apart for pieces, now._

Klaus decided to think about that when he was inside the wagon, sitting on a spare patch of floor and trying to act the part of a large but somewhat dimwitted minion. At first he stared into the middle distance, clutching the tiller only a little bit like a shield (the engine had been strapped to the roof.) But the scent of dried blood and antiseptic, the muffled crying from the cages to the right, the sing-songing horror in the back of his own mind, were all worse with nothing else to focus on.

Klaus hadn’t had a lot of playmates, growing up, but he’d had older brothers when he was young, and they had told plenty of horror stories. And then he had been the sole heir and his mother shared with him reports on local dangers and enemies, with less gruesome detail but much more factual accuracy. Hevvling&Sons’ wagon was everything he had ever imagined.

There was the dissecting table at the back of the wagon, cool and surgery-clean. Hans and Evon Hevvling sat and played cards at it while the wagon bumped along the road. A painted line divided it from the rest, where the cleanliness stopped mattering and cages lined the wagon walls. They were not large—anything, any _one_ , too big would be tied to the back and pulled along, or simply broken down where they were found, unwanted parts left behind for the vultures and the resellable elements stored in the freezers that made up the wagon floor. They made a hard and cold seat.

Only three of the eight cages were filled, now. One on the right held a…Klaus guessed woman, by the sound of her soft tears. She had wings, great, beautiful, gauzy things that looked derived from a moth. She wrapped them around herself as she wept, so that nothing else was visible. The captives on the left were both silent—a green-skinned man lay on the freezer-floor, stitches across every inch of skin not hidden by rags, so still that he might not have been breathing any more; and a thickly furred humanoid sat against a wall and stared directly at Klaus. He tried to continue meeting its eyes. He tried to communicate a promise. He tried to ignore the scent of dried blood, the feeling of stitches across his own chest, the sound of Bill and Hevvling chatting outside and the nursery rhyme running incessantly through his mind,

_Monsters have fangs, monsters have claws_  
Monsters have death rays and slavering maws  
Monsters have cunning, so heed me now, child:  
Trust least of all the monsters that smile...

It was a short trip back to Beetlesburg. Klaus startled when the wagon shuddered to a stop. Then he stood and yanked open the door to the driver’s seat as quickly as possible without appearing nervous. Fresh, non-bloody air rushed in.

The sight that greeted him was even more welcome. They had stopped just inside the city gates, faced down by a row of the double-armed cannons of the Beetlesburg Militia clanks. They surrounded the wagon, and in the distance, Klaus could see that the clocktower was awake and facing their direction.

Directly in front of the wagon stood Dr. Beetle himself. His moustache bristled as he frowned up at them—but it might have been nerves as easily as professorial displeasure.

“Lord Heterodyne,” he said sternly, as Klaus, perhaps the clanks, and the assorted onlookers beyond them held their breath. “I appreciate your extracurricular experiments and, perhaps, a desire to catch up with a colleague, but I should remind you that Mr. Hevvling and associates are on the official TPU list of Prohibited Suppliers, and—”

“Hy’m sorry, Dr. Beetle.” Bill jumped off the cart and turned his back to the Tyrant—and suddenly he was Bill Heterodyne again, student and amateur hero, planting his hands on his hips with a patented charming grin and none of the terrible force of a moment before. “We surprised them on the road, and thought we’d bring them back here for you to arrest for assorted counts of kidnap, murder, illegal biological trade, and other crimes against scientific freedom.”

“What?” Hevvling rose with a snarl. “When your father—”

“Our father has been dead for seven months.” And now it was Barry’s turn to be cold, with a death ray suddenly in his hand and pointed at the slaver. “Bill’s the Heterodyne, now. And the first thing we did was _burn_ the Fleshyards.”

Klaus took the moment to turn around and smash the tiller into the head of Hans Hevvling, who had been coming up behind him. This proved one strike too many for it, so Evon, he hit with a quick uppercut. He went sprawling, and Klaus chased him to the floor to grab the keys from his belt and toss them to the construct with fur, who was now sitting upright.

It wasn’t that simple, of course. It was several more fraught, gunfire-filled minutes before Hevvling and sons were bound and towed away by remorseless clanks, to be delivered directly to the jars in the town square. It was several even fraughter, more emotionally draining hours before the three ex-prisoners were medically stable and reasonably convinced of their own safety, despite the town full of sparks, and Klaus realized that sorting out which freezer contents should be kept versus burned did not actually need to be his job.

So he went looking for the heroes of the day, and found them both in Barry’s room despite the fact that Lucrezia Mongfish was holding court in a tavern just down the street.

“What,” Klaus asked without preamble, “the hell are your actual accents?”

They’d both heard him coming. Bill was the picture of a seventeen-year-old as he lay on the bed, wearing nothing but pajama pants and doodling designs in a notebook propped on the pillow. Barry was leaned against it on the floor, reading aloud from an adventure novel. At least, he had been. In what Klaus had never questioned as being his usual Romanian voice, with barely a trace of Mechanicsburg to it.

The Heterodynes looked at each other, then back at Klaus, and Bill wavered his hand and answered, “Mostly whatever other people are using? We’re good at subconscious adaptation. Like when you went back to Paris for winter break and came back dropping t’s.”

“Mother didn’t have a Mechanicsburg accent at all,” Barry added more quietly. “And she had charge of most of our rearing and education.”

“But Father wouldn’t have let her if we weren’t also still ‘a suitable heir und spare,’” said Bill, suddenly sharply Mechanic and cold again. But this time the sarcasm was self-directed, and he cast Barry an apologetic glance.

“Better hyu than me,” Barry said, scoffing and mad and bitterly, sympathetically, honest. Klaus had a sudden awareness of how _glad_ he was not to have to spend his life holding Wulfenbach as a bulwark, fighting to rein in a carelessly, dangerously charismatic Heterodyne with a loyal lieutenant and heir who preferred to focus on “miracles” of science.

Well, mostly. He dropped to the floor across from Barry and took out a notebook of his own. “Well, I was thinking. The tiller is a complete loss, now, so when we rebuild one from scratch, we might as well incorporate the engine pins into the shaft, I’m thinking in a three-four pattern…”

Bill leaned dangerously far off the bed to peer at the page. “No, the gears will stick—oh, I see, if we use half-tooths rather than four-fanged—”

“Okay, but what about the overflow inertia from the balloon itself?” Barry interrupted. “We’re still not balancing that enough—I’m telling you, we need to extend the brake lever…”

(And so it ends as it began, for now, at least: three sparks, who are also students, and fast friends. One taller and still coatless, though it makes more sense inside a cozy apartment than on a drizzling road; one shorter and still wearing both goggles and tools, because one never knows when they will be necessary; and one still without his shirt, because there never seemed the time to gain a new one, and anyway, after inventions have been rethought and the day’s experiences and the memories they returned have been eased a little away…well, there will still be some beautiful young women in a tavern down the block…

Yes, I think we will move back, for now, and let the voices fade. They aren’t going anywhere farther. Not yet.)


End file.
